Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Vishnugupta, alas Chanakya, alias Kautilya, gets the credit for everything from walking on diplomatic eggshells to the strategy for Armageddon; he might also be the godfather of social media as an instrument of statecraft. There is no treatise on governance as unsentimental as the Arthashastra in its prescriptions for the security of the king and sabotage of the enemy. Henry Kissinger, America’s National Security Advisor (NSA) in 1971 when Bangladesh was born, bubbles over with praise for the Arthashastra in his book World Order.
Chanakya advocated the use of “holy ascetics, wandering monks, cart-drivers, wandering minstrels, jugglers, tramps, fortune-tellers” to spread rumours and encourage disaffection with misinformation, exaggeration, and incendiary deceit to subvert enemies.
As the crisis in Bangladesh moves inexorably towards another crescendo, a thought occurs and recurs: Was someone in Pakistan reading Chanakya to better effect than we did in Delhi?
Simmering anger
By 2024 there was a visible groundswell against the Awami League in Dhaka because the democratic process had become infructuous. That happened and cannot be denied. There were mistakes made. Did masters of the dark arts in the Rawalpindi cantonment seize the opportunity to finance and foment this simmering anger, with or without the knowledge of those who were being used, through the pseudo-ascetic clerics of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the contemporary avatar of gullible cart-drivers, minstrels and tramps to transform discord into an insurrection that drove Sheikh Hasina out of her country? She would have lost her life if she had not left, perhaps shot dead in some ‘accident’ which would have never been investigated.
The speed with which the very temporary government of Muhammad Yunus has embraced Pakistan, traduced the nation’s history, and pursued a military bridge between the two countries indicates that their working relationship preceded the fall of Sheikh Hasina. Yunus made his money in Bangladesh but has lived in Europe and America for many decades now.
This relationship is being driven from Islamabad by the armed forces which have sidelined civilian authority from foreign policy. There have been more visits by Pakistani Generals to Dhaka in the past 50 weeks than in the past 50 years. Bangladesh has seen long spells of non-Awami League governments, but no one trespassed national sentiment and betrayed the memory of millions killed by the Pakistan Army in 1971. The Yunus Government has not even asked for an apology from Islamabad.
Supremacist dream
Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir and parties like the Bangla Jamaat-e-Islami share the supremacist dream of converting secular Bangladesh into a religious state. Jamaat is marginal thus far, but there are reports that the electoral stage is being set to ensure that the Jamaat influences the direction of policy after the February elections, as an interim step before taking full control. The Awami League has been eliminated from elections; the only obstacle is Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), started by her husband General Ziaur Rahman who took over soon after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975.
BNP will win the February elections. Those hostile to secularism and democracy will not sabotage its victory too quickly; that would be too flagrant a violation of democracy. But the next government will inevitably suffer from levels of inadequacy and unresolved leadership issues. Governance was never easy in Dhaka, and a fluid street will breed instability. Jamaat and its many international supporters will seek to take advantage of any stumble. It never takes long for disaffection to set in.
A sophisticated professional class with a proud cultural inheritance has given Bangladesh a bureaucracy, private sector, and security confidence. It is not fundamentalist in any sense of the term. It is deeply committed to Bengali culture, and Bangla nationalism: both remain powerful fundamental strengths of Bangladesh. They do not want to be in the grip of India but they understand that the plural and secular values of the Indian Constitution represent modernity, and reflect the horizon that they seek for their nation.
They are, at this moment, tired of the Awami League and uncertain about BNP. But they would be making a serious mistake if they underestimated the ideological challenge of the Jamaat. Some, but not many, of them may feel that the Jamaat can be co-opted into the prevalent system. Illusion can extract a heavy price. Jamaat ideologues have an invaluable asset – patience.
The generation that was in its teens in 1970 is now exhausted. Its leaders have passed their sell-by date; time has eroded their talent. The latest beneficiary, Yunus, will disappear quietly and quickly into the comforts of France and the friendship club of New York the moment he leaves office.
Cultural nationalism
Bangladesh has been destabilised by a crisis every so often in its five-decade history, but each time the vacuum was filled by a stable and committed gentry that believed in cultural nationalism, including within the Army. The country was troubled but there was no mayhem. The danger now is that history beckons towards the unknown.
Karl Marx, who understood that his aphorisms would survive when his theories had become bankrupt, wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. The farce is not fun; it might be chaotic.
(The writer is a veteran journalist, author of several books,
and a former minister in the
Indian Government)
